the world is a cold, cold place to be
Monday, 3 June 2013 01:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freckles_and_doubtHeavens to Betsy, it's June. You can tell by the driving rain, hail and icy cold, which are causing me to both freeze and rejoice in equal quantities, because I'm odd that way. Cape Town is in the middle of a giant three-day storm (someone's amazing pic of hailstones lying like snow in the city here), and Hobbit was recently discovered, after 24 hours of absence, curled in a ball of denial under the braai in the shed. It's bloody cold out there, I can only think he must have been hiding from the thunder. Twit. I also have a cold in the head attended by Sid the Sinus Headache, and am conducting today as an extended negotiation between the work that I need to do and my equal and opposite need to go home and hibernate. The sweet child who arrived for curriculum advice this morning struck a serious blow in the service of work ethic when, upon being granted the course change she wanted, she gave an ear-splitting squeal of joy, rushed around the desk and hugged me. She probably added a good hour to the time my butt remains in this chair, which at current showing has me fleeing the place at about 2.30 sharp.
She also mitigates to some extent against the perfectly obnoxious older-brother-of-student who rendered my Thursday afternoon hideous by shouting abuse at me for half an hour by the clock because his little sister can't graduate as expected, and whose toxicity permeated through most of the weekend, resulting in me being withdrawn and useless and having truly weird dreams. I blame him entirely for the current state of lurgi. He freaked me out, being really quite threatening, and it took me a good couple of days to throw off the lowering sense of failure and self-blame. He was an arsehole, who clearly intended at the outset to perform his anger until he'd browbeaten the faculty into acquiescence, and I don't think anything I could have said would have calmed him down, even if he'd let me get a word in edgeways. (I think that the fact that I was female probably made it worse: there's a certain kind of Zimbabwean black male for whom a woman questioning his authority is anathema). Fortunately he was trying to circumnavigate an iron-clad faculty rule which is never relaxed under any circumstances, and the whole performance was doomed. Idiot.
On the upside, this linguistic dissection of annoying teenage sounds was particularly giggle-inducing in the context of my students. You must watch the video, it's brilliant.
I have, for once, remembered that a new month entails a subject line reference post, but this got longer than I intended, I'll defer the payment of intellectual debts until tomorrow. In an attempt at a new approach to this: today's subject line courtesy of Vampire Weekend, whose first two albums I have been playing on rotation for the last couple of weeks. Lovely indie rock with an African music influence, it's bouncy and melodically inventive and clever and has a kwaito-ish edge which makes it weirdly familiar. The quote is off "Unbelievers", which is on their new album and not yet out in this country - I've been hitting YouTube.
She also mitigates to some extent against the perfectly obnoxious older-brother-of-student who rendered my Thursday afternoon hideous by shouting abuse at me for half an hour by the clock because his little sister can't graduate as expected, and whose toxicity permeated through most of the weekend, resulting in me being withdrawn and useless and having truly weird dreams. I blame him entirely for the current state of lurgi. He freaked me out, being really quite threatening, and it took me a good couple of days to throw off the lowering sense of failure and self-blame. He was an arsehole, who clearly intended at the outset to perform his anger until he'd browbeaten the faculty into acquiescence, and I don't think anything I could have said would have calmed him down, even if he'd let me get a word in edgeways. (I think that the fact that I was female probably made it worse: there's a certain kind of Zimbabwean black male for whom a woman questioning his authority is anathema). Fortunately he was trying to circumnavigate an iron-clad faculty rule which is never relaxed under any circumstances, and the whole performance was doomed. Idiot.
On the upside, this linguistic dissection of annoying teenage sounds was particularly giggle-inducing in the context of my students. You must watch the video, it's brilliant.
I have, for once, remembered that a new month entails a subject line reference post, but this got longer than I intended, I'll defer the payment of intellectual debts until tomorrow. In an attempt at a new approach to this: today's subject line courtesy of Vampire Weekend, whose first two albums I have been playing on rotation for the last couple of weeks. Lovely indie rock with an African music influence, it's bouncy and melodically inventive and clever and has a kwaito-ish edge which makes it weirdly familiar. The quote is off "Unbelievers", which is on their new album and not yet out in this country - I've been hitting YouTube.
